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The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Shari (00:00):
What is wrong with the church? And how can we fix it? In today's interview, we explore what people think is wrong with the church. Guests Blair Bertrand and Andy Root suggest that the church's problems are not necessarily what we think they are. We'll explore how secularism has shaped our imagination, and we'll explore different ways of thinking about what God is calling congregations to do next. Bertrand teaches theology at Zomba Theological University in Malawi and is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Root serves as Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary in Minnesota. He has written a number of books about youth ministry, culture, and congregations. Together, they co-authored the book titled, when Church Stops Working: A Future for Your Congregation beyond More Money, Programs, and Innovation. You're listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. We are just going to dive right in and start talking about problems. So anybody who works with pastors, people who are members of churches, people who lead churches or people who have left churches, they seem pretty eager to talk about the church having problems. So Andy, can you get us started in thinking about what people think is problematic in the church?
Andy (01:20):
Yeah, well, you couldn’t have more of a kind of problematic introduction to this by the title of our book. It seems incredibly clickbait-ey. The church isn't working. Our hair's on fire, everything's wrong with Protestantism, and we actually don't quite believe that. I mean, we're not naive. We do know that there are problems here, and as I often say to my students, most people are existentially aware. Most pastors, most leaders in congregations are kind of aware that one roof leak and they're done, just recovering from budget will be nearly impossible and it'll be nearly impossible to keep the church open with a nice $600,000 bill they weren't expecting. So we're not naive. We recognize that there are some big issues at play here around money, around cultural relevance and cultural engagement and things like that. But we do think that the narrative tends to be, the problem tends to be, that the church is in major decline when it comes to just resources overall and relevance probably underneath that.
Andy (02:28):
And we do kind of think that's the red herring, that that isn’t really the problem. I mean, it is, there's a problem there. Again, we're not naive, but that there's a deeper problem here at play than just the kind of loss of relevance and resources. But we think that the bigger problem is that this whole imagination that we live within, this kind of cultural imagination, tends to form us in a way, whether we like it or not, to block out the realities of God's action in the world. And that the real issue at play here is really the loss of visions and imaginations for God's action, ways in spaces to encounter that or to narrate those experiences we have. And so we think that's the real challenge. The real challenge is the deep kind of, I guess for lack of a better term, kind of immanent malaise that just hovers over our congregations where it becomes harder and harder for people to imagine there's a living, speaking God who's directing their lives and moving throughout history, and then, congregational life. Protestantism in general just becomes one other curricular activity of another, one other social group, and it's not really a good one. It's not really that engaging compared to CrossFit or maybe some kind of app that helps you prepare for a marathon or something like that. So once you…
Shari (03:58):
If we're reduced to being a thing on a calendar, it's not very competitive.
Andy (04:03):
Yeah, it will lose. And then you can see how then the drive, how that gets turned on us, how that boomerangs to us is that leaders have to find ways to make it as engaging, as sticky as all those other things, to be as interesting as all of that other stuff. And that is at the level of relevance, kind of cultural relevance and really a resource accruing. How does this help benefit people in a kind of dare say, a kind of capitalist, capital bound kind of mentality?
Blair (04:40):
One of the things that set us onto this path, not the major thing, but a thing is that if we look at a historical comparisons or cross-cultural comparisons, my day job is teaching in Africa, and so there isn't this narrative of decline present in the church in Africa. It's a narrative of growth and part of that growth is predicated or it's built on the fact that God's active and doing things and you show up to church expecting that the Holy Spirit is going to do something even if you're going to a Presbyterian church, that's who I work with.
Shari (05:24):
Even the Presbyterians.
Blair (05:25):
I know. So there's some sense in which the problem as we see it is that we just can't see that God is at work in the world. Other Christians have in the past and in other places, but a lot of churches have reduced Christianity to a set of beliefs or a sort of ethical standard, and there's no place for God to do anything in that. So when there's no place for God to do anything, we get caught up in trying to compete and we have to compete with everything else that looks similar. So worship becomes like a show because we're competing with, well now we're competing with Apple Music and streaming, Spotify. You're just basically competing with everything that is doing something that's similar to that, but you're not doing it as well.
Shari (06:30):
And how could you with everything available?
Blair (06:33):
Right. Yeah.
Shari (06:35):
Thank you, Blair. So this feels of course, deeply connected with Andy, what you've already written about secularism and the secular age, but if you could pull some of that in here to further explain kind of what you see as this misdiagnosis of the problem.
Andy (06:54):
We tend to see the seculars, well, to just put it bluntly, that fewer and fewer people are going to church. So that's what it means to live in a secular age, is that you can look at decline in religious participation, and that's the issue. So if that is the issue, then really the formative response to that, the way we need to be reformed, if you will, is to try to find ways to win participation. Because what we're lacking is participation. And again, there is something about the loss of participation. Any pastor listening to this right now knows that they feel that, that there's a lack of participation in coming back after the pandemic. People seem like they just, their bandwidth for participation is even less if that was even possible before the pandemic. So that is an issue, but we're really following this traditional thought that goes back to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor that sees what it really means to live in a secular age is that belief itself or the kind of conception of what it means to believe something or even not believe something, becomes fragilized, that we become very aware that there are people who believe very different things than we do and are doing okay, that they seem to be getting along just fine.
Andy (08:13):
And part of that issue, part of that kind of pluralism of beliefs that actually fragilizes our own beliefs is that it just becomes much harder for people to imagine again, that there's an act of God in the world. And so people can say things and say things all the time like, well, I'm going to take a break from God for a while. And the fact that in a larger cultural framework we can be like, oh yeah, that makes sense, or that's possible shows we live in a very different epoch than, well, like Blair was saying, other cultural contexts or other times where you just could not imagine it was possible for any human agent to live outside of or to take a break, my goodness, to take a break from God was just not something you could ever conceive of. And yet we have certain kind of imaginations, deeply believing people who feel like it's quite plausible and possible to take a break from God or you'll even have pastors who will admit things sometimes, like I think I preached every week for months, but if I'm really honest, I haven't thought about God in weeks or months or in a long time. And that's what it really means to live in a secular age, is that we are very aware we could be believing something else. We could be living in a different way, and just the overall imagination for this sense that there is a God who speaks and moves in history becomes, it just becomes hard. It kind of goes against the grain of our imagination.
Shari (09:44):
You describe the secular age for the church and for Christians as an infection. Would you say it's primarily an infection of the imagination?
Blair (09:55):
Yeah, likely.
Andy (09:56):
Yeah. What do you think, Blair?
Blair (09:58):
Yeah, because I think if you, we use an analogy in the book where we talk about if a forester looks at a forest and an ecologist looks at a forest and an artist looks at a forest, they each have been prepared in their imaginations to imagine that forest in different ways. One views it as lumber. One views it as an ecosystem. One looks at it for beauty. And the problem with our time is, is that we've been so shaped by this secular world that says that there is no God acting, that all, everything can get explained by what's going on in this material world, that we can't even imagine that the church or God could be doing something different. And so it's an infection that has just slowly taken away our ability to view the world in different ways. And so we're now into this monolithic way of viewing the world, and that way isn’t just, it could be religious and still be secular. It could be…
Shari (11:12):
What do you mean by that?
Blair (11:13):
Well, anytime I hear somebody say, we just need to get back to biblical principles, if we could just get back to biblical principles, we would be, and I'm like, really? Those are words and ideas that certainly that come from scripture, and that's great, but that's not God. We don't worship principles. And so if we build our whole reason for being around these principles, then we're no less secular than somebody who would do something similar on another basis because we’ve taken, we can't imagine that God would continue to act in the world. And I think that that’s, it's hard to explain, but it's also I think hard to come to grips with, is the fact that much of our church life is already secular because it already assumes that God is not present and that God is not going to intervene and that God is not at work in the world.
Andy (12:19):
And one of the other ways to build on that that kind of pushes us forward in the book too is that there's just been a huge shift that the modern project overall, so really for the last 300 or so years has been kind of pushing forward, which really drives human action to be more about escalation and growth. And usually, again, like we said earlier, growth of capital, growth of resources, growth of reach, growth of being able to get more of something in that you stabilize yourself by getting more. And that's a framework we all share. And it's really hard for any of us to kind of opt out of that. And that imposes on us a kind of immanent frame, as Charles Taylor calls it, where we tend to presume things not through mythical, ritualized kind of frameworks, not through deeply enchanted ones. The reason that your child is sick is because, well, or there's just chaos across the world is because of a unseen demonic realm at play or something like that.
Andy (13:20):
I mean, there's still some people that hold onto those kind of beliefs, but our larger institutional structures in a globalized world tend not to be. And so those frame us in a certain way. So the way our whole kind of societies function, and I think this is for the most part true across the globe, is that a solid institution, a good life is a growing life. And that means that you need to be expending more and more energy, getting more and more, saving for a rainy day, living off kind of a crude value that you continue to secure for yourself. And that is a very different imagination than say in the medieval period or back, where your actions were really to continue to perpetuate the cultic realities, that to do the rituals, that those were what was important. And now we tend to see what's important is optimizing our action to be able to get more value out of it and continue to grow that value.
Andy (14:19):
And what matters is how much energy you can expend. So you just look at the Internet and there's all sorts of pills and exercises and meditation apps and all those things are there so that you can optimize yourself to get more energy out of your actions because if you can have more energy and if you can rework your diet and have more energy, then you can have more reach. And if you have more reach, then you can actually accrue more value out of each of your actions. You can expend more energy and you can be living a better life and you can save yourself and you can save your church and all will be good. So we're pretty worried about that. We're not sure that that in the end is very good.
Shari (14:58):
Yeah, it was striking, I mean, it's striking to me hearing you talk about this, what a big industry the self-help industry is, and even to the point that we have almost have an industry now being built around anti-self-help, which still capitalizes on that. But when I was reading it struck, I was struck by how many words had to do with acceleration, growth, pace. I almost felt myself speeding up and then slowing down while I was reading your book because there is this sense of both in the individual and communal realms that we inhabit of always be growing, always be improving, always be seeking more, better for yourself. It was really striking to me. It maybe goes without saying, but I'm curious, Blair, it might go without saying why we think the church should resist this, but I'm curious what your thoughts are in response to that.
Blair (15:57):
Well, we've touched on a bunch. I think the easy answer is we just don't think it's as faithful, and we don't think it's as attuned to reality. We actually think that God exists, and so wouldn't it be better to act in alignment with that? But I also think that there's some sense in which the secular project gets us to some good places, like medical health. I think we want doctors and not just exorcists, for instance. That's a good thing. So there are lots of good things about the secular project that has kind of fueled this, but one of them is not connection with other people. In fact, this is a very disorienting and destructive way of thinking about the world, for our relationships. And we see that all over the place. We know that people are participating less. We know that people are encountering each other less and less, and partly because we use each other in more utilitarian ways more and more.
Blair (17:16):
And the pandemic didn't help with this. So now we could have a whole conversation about social media and the ways in which that kind of way of relating with each other only accelerates the disconnection from each other. And so I think that people are hungry to actually have connection both with other people and with God. And the secular imagination isn't going to get us there, so why don't we try something else and see what that is. And, when people do try, I think, they, the word that we use, they would resonate with that. They really, they vibe with that. I don't know how to put it any better.
Blair (18:08):
So I think there are some negative reasons to not go with the secular, but there's also, there's this drive or this hunger for real connection and an encounter with God and encounter with people. I guess the other thing, sub-thing of that would be that, that people actually do have these experiences and they don't know what to do with them and they don't recognize them and they don't, and the church hasn't been really a great place if we keep focusing on more money and programs and innovation and those things, we're not focusing on how we've encountered God and giving language to that. So people go through these horrible events, but they experience grace in the middle of that and they don't have a way of talking about that. And we miss out on that when we don’t, when we're always focused on the more of the secular side.
Shari (19:13):
Yeah, thank you. It's striking that we've kind of critiqued this frantic pace that so many of us just feel like we get sucked into in our current context. But the counter perspective of that that you highlight is the idea of waiting. So can you talk a bit about the significance of waiting?
Blair (19:34):
In Acts 1, they're in the Upper Room and they're doing worship and those kind of things and waiting for the Spirit to arrive, but they get really anxious about it, I think, and they don't know what's going on. This is a resurrection. It's not happened before. So what the heck is going on? And so Peter knows that, he knows his Bible and he knows that there needs to be 12 apostles because there were 12 tribes of Israel, and with Judas gone, we only have 11, so we better have an election because if we go too long without having 12, maybe God won't show up. We have no idea what, we just want to be faithful. And so they do a little bit of church administration. They call an election, and at the end of the day, they cast lots and a guy named Matthias gets elected as the 12th apostle, and then we never hear from 'em again, not once.
Blair (20:42):
And if they had waited until later in Acts, they would've realized that Paul is the 12th apostle, that God's already chosen the 12th apostle and God will act in time to choose the 12th apostle. Now they don't get condemned for doing this little bit of administrative busy work and they don't get struck dead or anything, and there’s no, there's nothing, but they also don't get commended for it, and there's no sort of great benefit out of this. And so I wonder just how much of the stuff that we do is in that Matthias moment. We're trying to be faithful and yeah, we're not being bad, but we're not really waiting for the fullness of what God is going to do. And that's hard. I sit at my session meetings, the group of elders, and they're like, well, we got to do something. I'm like, we could likely pray, that'd be a good, no, we have to make some decisions. We have to see action. So yeah, we get that it's difficult, but Paul doesn't exist on our time. Paul exists on God's time.
Shari (22:03):
Yeah, that's really beautiful. It's striking how many stories in scripture have waiting in them, but we kind of forget, even in Holy Saturday, we forget that there was this fear and this waiting before God acts.
Blair (22:20):
And I get, we get the fear part because there's some sense of what if God doesn't show up? These are life and death sort of things that we're talking about, and these are my kids and I want God to show up for them, or these are my neighbors, or this is me and I really want God to show up. And so there's this moment where faith starts to take on a whole new character and hope starts to take on, hope is often, we often think that hope is just sort of hyper-positive thinking that things are going to get better, and in reality, in the waiting things are going to get more godly. But that doesn't necessarily say that it's going to be better in the metric of more. And so this idea of waiting starts to reframe our doctrines and our stance towards God. Faith, hope and love become different, I think.
Shari (23:29):
Yeah. I love that you described the act of choosing another apostle as church administration because it's a perfect segue to where I wanted to go next, which is calling a meeting, doing some church administration, often for churches involves their mission statement, coming up with this perfect statement about why we exist, what are we up to? And you have a few things to say about that. I'm curious if you could talk about mission statements and how you'd like to shift that conversation.
Blair (24:05):
Yeah, we have opinions, and part of it's because, like, I'm a pastor. I'm pastor at a little church at the moment and pastored bigger churches at different times. We've all had mission statements. And so the basic reality is, is that the mission statements came into the church at the same time as they came into business because they were supposed to focus us. They were supposed to make a business more efficient, right? So already, the very logic of the mission statement is, if you think that capitalism is secular and is part of the problem, then adopting those strategies is already a little bit suspect. But here's the other crazy thing, they just don’t, they don't seem to work.
Blair (25:02):
Every business that's gone bankrupt has had a mission statement. Every church that's closed has had a mission statement. So if the problem is decline, and our answer is mission statements, that's not been a particularly effective answer because it really hasn't changed anything. They come in in the early eighties, and if we look at the graphs, if the problem is decline, they just keep on going down. So they feel like they should be doing something, but they don't seem to actually do anything. And we think it's because if you look at any kind of church mission statement, they're pretty generic and they're pretty benign in lots of ways, and they're also focused on what we're doing, not on what God's doing. So it makes us the star of the show and actually excludes the real star, who is God. I recognize that some people are very high on mission statements and you could do that, but we've spent a bunch more time thinking about watchwords. I'll give it to Andy. He can talk about watchwords a little bit. Now, I could be the lightning rod for people who love mission statements. And Andy…
Andy (26:27):
I really like mission statements. So send all your emails to Blair.
Shari (26:31):
Noted. On it.
Andy (26:35):
Yeah, I mean, watchword is a kind of strange contrast to a mission statement, I think. And particularly I think for North Americans. Watchword is not something that's in our vocabulary, though you'll sometimes hear it pop up for folks in the UK or sometimes continental Europeans or something will use this metaphor of a watchword. And it really is just this kind of sense of being on watch for something, having a kind of word that becomes a slogan, but not like in a consumer jingle, but a slogan like a theological one, like “justification by faith alone” or something, which is a kind of theological slogan that inhabits a huge, huge mammoth mountain of a concept, but it comes to us in a kind of slogan that represents a deep kind of form. So I really draw this on, in another book that I worked on and a story by this late-19th-century pastor named Johann Blumhardt who had this experience that really renewed his church.
Andy (27:34):
It's a very kind of, I guess made for Hollywood kind of story, but there was an exorcism that happened within his community, which was very, very weird and very engaging to read. But essentially what happened out of this movement where this evil spirit was cast out of this woman again in the late-19th century and in Germany, that this watchword came where “Jesus is Lord” became a statement that came out of this experience, and it became the congregation's watchword for decades because it encompassed this whole experience of what it meant to care for this young woman, what it meant to pray for them. And so “Jesus is Lord” became this kind of statement that God has moved, that God has brought healing and life to people in this community. And so it encompassed this deep narrative of God's work, of really God's work in opposition to our cultural conceptions.
Andy (28:31):
It was very much a radical break with what people assumed this kind of force of God bringing restoration to this family and to this young woman particularly. And so the elder Blumhardt, as he's often called, kept this word before the congregation at all times, and it was their watchword that this God is a God who moves, who brings life out of death. This is a God who is Lord, Jesus Christ is Lord and restores human beings. And so we think part of the real leadership demand here, and I do think this could be part of a misread of us, it's like, well, you want to wait. You want God to do all the work, therefore the pastor doesn't do anything. There's no real leadership demand here. And we actually think it's the opposite, that there's heavy leadership demand for the pastor or the minister here.
Andy (29:20):
And it is to create these spaces where people can encounter each other in deep forms of relationship and where you hold people's stories and invite people to share their stories and help even in conversation and in deep prayer, offer their stories back to them as a watchword, that this is how God moves in this community. God takes what is dead and makes it alive. Or Martin Luther King Jr. found his own watchword during the civil rights movement where he had a moment of prayer at his kitchen table, and he heard God say to him, Martin, when there's no way I'll make a way. So he started to preach that, that this is a God who makes a way out of no way. And that became kind of the watchword for his community, that when there's no way God makes a way, and it was really bound in these deep experiences that shattered or at least broke into the immanent frame and spoke of a living God in the midst of people's concrete lives.
Shari (30:19):
Yeah, I love those stories. I was sensing in myself like, ooh, you could build a curriculum, like ditch your mission statement and find your perfect watchword, but what your stories are illuminating is that you're not suggesting that you can flip a switch and find something different. But I think you're saying it involves actually listening to each other. I'm curious if there are any other stories that come to mind for you of, you describe it as discerning a theme in their stories within a congregation. Is there another story that comes to mind?
Blair (30:55):
Well, we tell a couple of stories in the book to try to give people examples. One from a small church and one from kind of a medium-sized church. And both of these, they're slightly different, but both of them have some kind of watchword, the one arises from a pastor's experience, and it's “feed more sheep,” or “feed my sheep” from John. And where this kind of, he shapes his life around this, he preaches, the table is super important to him, and these people are a flock, so very pastoral imagery and his self-identity, but it starts to catch on in the congregation. And so they actually go out and are figuring out, how can we feed more sheep? How can we not just be about ourselves? How can we be outside of ourselves? How can we, and they've got some opportunities to do that in practical ways.
Blair (32:05):
But the original story likely comes from a moment of seeing bullying in kind of an extreme form in this pastor's life and realizing that the sheep are harried and that they need protection and that this really resonated with him. And so it's become this watchword for him and for this congregation. The other story has to do with an older couple who have a child, I don't want to spoil it too much, but they're teaching Sunday School and they really suck at teaching Sunday School, from an instrumental perspective. They don't follow the right curriculum, they don't take attendance in the right way, they don't, but everybody loves them. Everybody loves them, and they really only have one lesson, which is that nothing can separate you from the love of God. And there are a number of deaths in the community that this all of a sudden becomes this profound word that orients all of the congregation around this. So I think that one of the things that you would see is that to have a story of watchword likely requires a certain amount of vulnerability that is not valued in our normal businesslike world and vulnerability is going to come through an encounter with somebody else and with God, Martin Luther King Jr.’s comes when he's being threatened by racists.
Blair (33:59):
The Blumhardts, this young woman is oppressed. The pastor in the small church experiences and witnesses bullying, the couple in the church experienced some death. All of these things are things that we don't want to talk about, we don't want to be vulnerable to, but those are the kind of, that's the soil that God seems to be present in and speaking to us in. And it launches all of these people into lives of active service and ministry. But it likely doesn't start by thinking about what's the end of my active service and ministry? It starts by who's God and where's God in this situation? And then the active ministry and service flows from that.
Shari (34:54):
You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. I'm your host, Shari Oosting. Our editorial and production team includes LaDonna Damon, Armond Banks, Madeline Polhill, and Garrett Mostowski. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of Continuing Education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Thanks for listening.